Einsteins last great problem: who owns his house?
“My paradise,” was how Albert Einstein described the house near Berlin where he spent his last summers in Germany, pottering around in the garden, messing about on his boat and penning the famous “Why War?” letters to Sigmund Freud. Paradise is not yet lost, though its fabric has been weakened by the passage of time, and a row about ownership rights has landed Einstein’s relatives in purgatory. While the heirs and the village of Caputh slug it out in court, the timber frame of the listed monument, built for Einstein in 1929 by the leading Bauhaus architect, Konrad Wachsmann, is rotting away. It will not be repaired until somebody decides who the rightful owner is. The battle, now in its sixth year, has become a test case for thousands of Jewish property claims meandering since reunification through Germany’s legal labyrinth. Weighing in at opposite corners are two different arms of the state, several Jewish institutions, and an old woman living in New York. The village bases its claim
